and universally.

In this phase of his genius, however, there is perhaps, for some tastes at any rate, a little too much of what has been called bravura—too much of the merely epideictic. It is not so in the other. Appreciate the appreciation of the Winter’s Tale passage; still more take to heart (they will go to it without much taking where there is one) the “First Acquaintance with Poets,” or still better the marvellous critical swan-song of the “Farewell,” and there can be no more doubt about Hazlitt. Quia multum amavit is at once his best description and his greatest glory. In all the range of criticism which I have read I can hardly think of any one except Longinus who displays the same faculty of not unreasonable or unreasoned passion for literature; and Longinus, alas! has, as an opportunity for showing this to us, scarcely more than the bulk of one of Hazlitt’s longest Essays, of which, long and short, Hazlitt himself has given us, I suppose, a hundred. Nor, as in some others (many, if not most of whom, if I named them, I should name for the sake of honour), is a genuine passion made the mere theme of elaborate and deliberate literary variations. As we have seen, Hazlitt will often leave it expressed in one sentence of ejaculatory and convincing fervour; it seldom appears at greater length than that of a passage, while a whole lecture or essay in the key of rapture is exceedingly rare. Hazlitt is desultory, irrelevant, splenetic, moody, self-contradictory; but he is never merely pleonastic,—there is no mere verbiage, no mere virtuosity, in him.

And the consequence is that this enthusiastic appreciation of letters, which I have, however heretically, taken throughout this book to be really the highest function of criticism, catches: that the critical yeast (to plagiarise from ourselves) never fails to work. The order of history, as always, should probably be repeated, and the influence of Coleridge should be felt, as Hazlitt himself felt it, first: it is well to fortify also with Longinus himself, and with Aristotle, and with as many others of the great ones as the student can manage to master. But there is at least a danger, with some perhaps of not the worst minds, of all this remaining cold as the bonfire before the torch is applied. The silex scintillans of Hazlitt’s rugged heart will seldom fail to give the vivifying spark from its own inward and immortal fire.[[518]]

Blake.

There have been times—perhaps they are not quite over—when the admission of William Blake[[519]] into the category of critics would have been regarded as an absurdity, or a bad jest. Nothing is more certain, however, than that the poet-painter expresses, with a force and directness rather improved by that lack of complete technical sanity which some of his admirers most unwisely and needlessly deny, the opinions of the “Extreme Right,” the high-fliers of the Army of Romanticism. He may often be thinking of painting rather than of poetry; but this is sometimes expressedly not the case, and many of his most pointed sayings apply to the one art just as well as to the other—if indeed it would not be still more correct to say that, except when they concern mere technique, they always apply to both. His work, despite the attention which it has received from hands, sometimes of the most eminent, during the last forty years, [has never yet been edited] in a fashion making its chaos cosmic or the threading of its labyrinths easy: and it may be well to bring together some of the most noteworthy critical expressions in it. That which has been referred to in a former passage,[[520]] “Every man is a judge of pictures who has not been connoisseured out of his senses,”[[521]] is in itself almost a miniature manifesto of the new school of criticism. For “connoisseurship”—the regular training in the orthodox system of judgment by rule and line and pattern—is substituted the impression of the natural man, unconditioned except by the retirement that it shall be impression, and not prejudice.

His critical position and dicta.

So, again, that remarkable expression of the Prophet Isaiah[[522]] when, as Blake casually mentions, he and Ezekiel “dined with me”—an occasion on which surely any one of taste would like to have completed the quartette. The poet-host tells us that he asked, “Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so make it so?” and that the prophet-guest answered, “All poets believe that it does”—a position from which La Harpism and the reluctance to “surrender disbelief” are at once crushed, concluded, and quelled.

In the remarkable engraved page on Homer and Virgil,[[523]] Blake adventures himself (not with such rashness as may at first seem) against Aristotle (or what he takes for Aristotle), by laying it down that Unity and Morality belong to philosophy, not poetry, or at least are secondary in the latter; that goodness and badness are not distinctions of “character” (a saying in which there is some quibbling but much depth as well); that the Classics, not Goths or Monks, “desolate Europe with wars” (a great enough dictum at the junction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries); and that “Grecian wit is mathematical form,” which is only “eternal in the reasoning memory,” while Gothic is “living form, that is to say, eternal existence”—perhaps the deepest saying of the whole, though it wants large allowance and intelligent taking.